“Yeah, it’s pretty terrifying how quickly it flew by.”
“You just felt this incredible energy in the audience when you were watching the movie.
Everyone was so into it.”
Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson in ‘The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It’.Warner Bros.
“I was like, ‘Oh my goodness!
He believed Wan to be the perfect candidate to direct.
“Insidioushad just come out and we all had loved it,” the producer says.
“He was the only guy we ever spoke to about the movie.
“I think Vera was the very first person we reached out to,” he says.
Lucky for us, he agreed.”
If I take the horror out of it, the movie could still play as a normal family drama.
So, I had a vision and I knew I just had to stick to it.”
“It was a busy weekend.
It was in the summer.
“The Conjuringwas a brand that nobody knew.”
to the Ryan Reynolds-starringR.I.P.D.when Wan’s film easily topped the box office upon release.
“Going into the weekend, we were tracking to do $20 million.
By the way, everyone would have beenthrilledby that.
By the end of the weekend, it [grossed] $40 million.
“That was the beginning of it all,” Safran says.
“It was pretty obvious from the get-go that people loved that character.
“I love working with Patrick and Vera and New Line.
“The primary antagonist inConjuring 2was actually going to be depicted by this big demon,” Wan says.
That was when I went down the path of the Demon Nun.
I wanted to create an antagonist that came from a personal place for Ed and Lorraine Warren.
That was how the Demon Nun came about.”
He was really excited about it,” Wan says.
“It felt like the next natural stepping stone for him.
So, he came on board, and he definitely did a great job with continuing theAnnabellefranchise.”
“You hate to pick amongst your children, right?”
“But it really is one of my favorites.
I thought that the scares were really unique.
“He was like, ‘Say no more.
I love these types of movies.
I know exactly what you mean.’
Tonally,The Nunstill belongs in theConjuringuniverse, but setting it in Europe makes it feel more unique.
That’s what we felt likeThe Nunneeded to have, something that’s different to the other films.”
So is the film really part of the universe?
He adds, “Peter still gave his permission to let the character be in there.
The presenter introduced the movie as the next entry in theConjuringuniverse.
So that was a big kind of faux pas.
It was a big mess-up, and that’s the truth of how that all came together.”
Safran himself insists, good-naturedly but firmly, thatThe Curse of La Lloronais “not part ofThe Conjuringuniverse.”
“you could’t count it!”
It felt like an Amblin horror film, and that’s very much Gary’s sensibility.
I like that eachAnnabellemovie all have their own flavor that the directors bring to them.”
With Wan busy directingMalignant, Chaves stepped in to continue the saga of Ed and Lorraine.
This was getting outside of the haunted house format and trying to do something more as an investigation.
I’m really proud of a lot of sequences in that movie, but definitely the opening exorcism.
I’ve heard from so many people that it’s one of their favorite sequences in the franchise.”
“But we saw that at the end of the first movie that the evil was still with him.
It’s slowly percolating, coming back to the forefront.
I love this platonic friendship that the two of them have.
She cares very much for him, and she wants to do everything she can to help him.
At the same time, she has to confront this evil and fight it again.”
“It was one of those scripts you read and is legitimately scary,” he says.
The Nun IIwill now be released in theaters Sep. 8.
Last October, Warner Bros.
However, the producer-turned-executive is keen to reassureConjuringfans that there are plenty more big-screen bumps-in-the-night on the way.
“There’s some incredibly interesting stuff coming down the pipeline,” Safran says.
“On the feature-film front, there are a couple of things that I think are wonderful.
I think our fans will be very pleased when they hear what they’re doing.”
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